Falling Stars, Damnable Heresy, and the Spirit of Evolution

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22).

“And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1)

In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who,

"Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the powers of hell against the churches of Christ."

John identifies antichrists, in this case clergy who serve the devil rather than Christ, sequentially. First, like Bultmann, Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Funk, Paul Tillich, and John Shelby Spong, they specifically deny the living, personal Holy Trinity in favor of Gnostic pagan, immanent or Eastern pantheist conceptions. Though God the Father Almighty in three Persons upholds the souls of men and maintains life and creation, His substance is not within nature (space-time dimension) as pantheism maintains, but outside of it. Sinful men live within nature and are burdened by time and mortality; God is not.

Second, the specific denial of the Father logically negates Jesus the Christ, the Word who was in the beginning (John 1), was with God, and is God from the creation of all things (1 John 1). In a pre-incarnate theophany, Jesus is the Angel who spoke “mouth to mouth” to Moses (Num. 12:6-9; John 9:20) and at sundry times and in many ways “spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all…” (Hebrews 1:1) Jesus the Christ is the incarnate Son of God who is the life and light of men, who by His shed blood on the Cross died for the remission of all sins and bestowed the privilege of adoption on all who put their faith in Him.

Therefore, to deny the Holy Father is to logically deny the deity of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hence,

“…every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist . . . and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).

According to Peter (2 Peter 2:1), falling stars will work among the faithful, teaching damnable heresies that deny the Lord, cause the fall of men into unbelief, and bring destruction upon themselves:

“The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief.” Many thinking people came at last “to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief. Having made God more and more like man---intellectually, morally, emotionally---the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man.” (James Turner of the University of Michigan in “American Babylon,” Richard John Neuhaus, p. 95)

Almost thirty years ago, two well-respected social science scholars, William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark found themselves alarmed by what they saw as a rising tide of irrationalism, superstition and occultism---channeling cults, spirit familiars, necromancers, Wiccans, Satanists, Luciferians, goddess worshippers, 'gay' shamans, Hermetic magicians and other occult madness at every level of society, particularly within the most influential--- Hollywood, academia and the highest corridors of political power.

Like many scientists, they were equally concerned by Christian opposition to naturalistic evolution. As is common in the science community, they assumed the cause of these social pathologies was somehow due to fundamentalism, their term for authentic Christian theism as opposed to liberalized Christianity. Yet to their credit, the research they undertook to discover the cause was conducted both scientifically and with great integrity. What they found was so startling it caused them to re-evaluate their attitude toward authentic Christian theism. Their findings led them to say:

"It would be a mistake to conclude that fundamentalists oppose all science (when in reality they but oppose) a single theory (that) directly contradicts the bible. But it would be an equally great mistake to conclude that religious liberals and the irreligious possess superior minds of great rationality, to see them as modern personalities who have no need of the supernatural or any propensity to believe unscientific superstitions. On the contrary...they are much more likely to accept the new superstitions. It is the fundamentalists who appear most virtuous according to scientific standards when we examine the cults and pseudo-sciences proliferating in our society today." ("Superstitions, Old and New," The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. IV, No. 4; summer, 1980)

In more detail they observed that authentic ‘born again’ Christians are far less likely to accept cults and pseudoscientific beliefs while the irreligious and liberalized Christians (i.e., progressive Catholics, Protestant emergent, NAR, word faith, prosperity gospel) are open to unscientific notions. In fact, these two groups are most disposed toward occultism.

As Bainbridge and Stark admitted, evolution directly contradicts the Bible, beginning with the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo. This means that evolution is the antithesis of the Genesis account. For this reason, discerning Christians refuse to submit to the evolutionary thinking that has swept Western and American society. Nor do they accept the evolutionary theism brought into the whole body of the Church by weak, tepid, indecisive, or apostate clergy.

Over eighty years ago, Rev. C. Leopold Clarke wrote that priests who embrace evolution (evolutionary theists) are apostates from the ‘Truth as it is in Jesus.’ (1 John2:2) Rev. Clarke, a lecturer at a London Bible college, discerned that evolution is the antithesis to the Revelation of God in the Deity of Jesus Christ, thus it is the greatest and most active agent of moral and spiritual disintegration:

“It is a battering-ram of unbelief---a sapping and mining operation that intends to blow Religion sky-high. The one thing which the human mind demands in its conception of God, is that, being Almighty, He works sovereignly and miraculously---and this is the thing with which Evolution dispenses….Already a tremendous effect, on a wide scale has been produced by the impact of this teaching---an effect which can only be likened to the…collapse of foundations…” (Evolution and the Break-Up of Christendom, Philip Bell, creation.com, Nov. 27, 2012)

The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed ‘mouth to mouth’ by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ. But how horrible a travesty of the sacred office of the Christian Ministry to see church leaders more eager to be abreast of the times, than earnestly contending for the Faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 1:3). It is high time, said Rev. Clarke, that the Church,

“…. separated herself from the humiliating entanglement attending her desire to be thought up to date…What, after all, have custodians of Divine Revelation to do making terms with speculative Biology, which has….no message of comfort or help to the soul?” (ibid)

The primary tactic employed by priests eager to accommodate themselves and the Church to modern science and evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when we see Genesis, especially the first three chapters, in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is the argument embraced and advanced by mega-church pastor Timothy J. Keller.

With a position paper Keller published with the theistic evolutionary organization Bio Logos he joined the ranks of falling stars (Catholic and Protestant priests) stretching back to the Renaissance. Their slippery-slide into apostasy began when they gave into the temptation to embrace a non-literal, non-historical view of Genesis. (A response to Timothy Keller’s ‘Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople,” Lita Cosner, Sept. 9, 2010, creation.com)

This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this damnable heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of the Origenists. Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics,

“…let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)

As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic meaning of Genesis and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40)

In the integral worldview teachings of the Fathers, neither the literal nor historical meaning of the Revelations of the pre-incarnate Jesus, the Angel who spoke to Moses, can be regarded as expendable. There are at least four critically important reasons why. First, to reduce the Revelation of God to allegory and myth is to contradict and usurp the authority of God, ultimately deny the deity of Jesus Christ; twist, distort, add to and subtract from the entire Bible and finally, to imperil the salvation of believers.

Scenarios commonly proposed by modern Origenists posit a cleverly disguised pantheist/immanent nature deity subject to the space-time dimension and forces of evolution. But as noted previously, it is sinful man who carries the burden of time, not God. This is a crucial point, for when evolutionary theists add millions and billions of zeros (time) to God they have transferred their own limitations onto Him. They have ‘limited’ God and made Him over in their own image. This is not only idolatrous but satanic.

Additionally, evolution inverts creation. In place of God’s good creation from which men fell there is an evolutionary escalator starting at the bottom with matter, then progressing upward toward life, then up and through the life and death of millions of evolved creatures that preceded humans by millions of years until at long last an apish humanoid emerges into which a deity that is always in a state of becoming (evolving) places a soul.

Evolution amputates the entire historical precedent from the Gospel and makes Jesus Christ unnecessary as the atheist Frank Zindler enthusiastically points out:

“The most devastating thing that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus…into the ranks of the unemployed. I think evolution absolutely is the death knell of Christianity.” (“Atheism vs. Christianity,” 1996, Lita Cosner, creation.com, June 13, 2013)

None of this was lost on Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1985). Huxley was thoroughly familiar with the Bible, thus he understood that if Genesis is not the authoritative Word of God, is not historical and literal despite its’ symbolic and poetic elements, then the entirety of Scripture becomes a collection of fairytales resulting in tragic downward spiraling consequences as the Catholic Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation makes clear in part:

“By denying the historical truth of the first chapters of Genesis, theistic evolutionism has fostered a preoccupation with natural causes almost to the exclusion of supernatural ones. By denying the several supernatural creative acts of God in Genesis, and by downplaying the importance of the supernatural activity of Satan, theistic evolutionists slip into a naturalistic mentality which seeks to explain everything in terms of natural causes. Once this mentality takes hold, it is easy for men to regard the concept of spiritual warfare as a holdover from the days of primitive superstition. Diabolical activity is reduced to material or psychological causes. The devil and his demons come to be seen as irrelevant. Soon ‘hell’ joins the devil and his demons in the category of antiquated concepts. And the theistic evolutionist easily makes the fatal mistake of thinking that he has nothing more to fear from the devil and his angels. According to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of Rome, there is a tremendous increase in diabolical activity and influence in the formerly Christian world. And yet most of the bishops of Europe no longer believe in the existence of evil spirits….To the Fathers of the Church who believed in the truth of Genesis, this would be incredible. But in view of the almost universal acceptance of theistic evolution, it is hardly surprising.” (The Difference it makes: The Importance of the Traditional Doctrine of Creation, Hugh Owen, kolbecenter.org)

Huxley had ‘zero’ respect for modern Origenists and received enormous pleasure from heaping piles of hot coals and burning contempt upon them, thereby exposing their shallow-reasoning, hypocrisy, timidity, fear of non-acceptance, and unfaithfulness. With sarcasm dripping from his words he quipped,

“I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value unless they possess the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh; if the “ten words” were not written by God’s hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the stories of the regal period of Rome—what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands?” (Darwin’s Bulldog---Thomas Huxley, Russell Grigg, creation.com, Oct. 14, 2008)

“When Jesus spoke, as of a matter of fact, that "the Flood came and destroyed them all," did he believe that the Deluge really took place, or not? It seems to me that, as the narrative mentions Noah’s wife, and his sons’ wives, there is good scriptural warranty for the statement that the antediluvians married and were given in marriage; and I should have thought that their eating and drinking might be assumed by the firmest believer in the literal truth of the story. Moreover, I venture to ask what sort of value, as an illustration of God’s methods of dealing with sin, has an account of an event that never happened? If no Flood swept the careless people away, how is the warning of more worth than the cry of “Wolf” when there is no wolf? If Jonah’s three days’ residence in the whale is not an “admitted reality,” how could it “warrant belief” in the “coming resurrection?” … Suppose that a Conservative orator warns his hearers to beware of great political and social changes, lest they end, as in France, in the domination of a Robespierre; what becomes, not only of his argument, but of his veracity, if he, personally, does not believe that Robespierre existed and did the deeds attributed to him?” (ibid)

“If divine authority is not here claimed for the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, what is the value of language? And again, I ask, if one may play fast and loose with the story of the Fall as a “type” or “allegory,” what becomes of the foundation of Pauline theology?” (ibid)

“If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive “type,” comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has Paul’s dialectic?” (ibid)

After much thought, C.S. Lewis concluded that evolution is the central, most radical lie at the center of a vast network of lies within which modern Westerners are entangled while Rev. Clarke identifies the central lie as the Gospel of another Spirit. The fiendish aim of this Spirit is to help men lose God, not find Him, and by contradicting the Divine Redeemer, compromising Priests are serving this Spirit and its’ diabolical purposes. To contradict the Divine Redeemer is the very essence of unfaithfulness, and that it should be done while reverence is professed,

“…. is an illustration of the intellectual and moral topsy-turvydom of Modernism…’He whom God hath sent speaketh the Words of God,’ claimed Christ of Himself (John 3:34), and no assumption of error can hold water in the face of that declaration, without blasphemy.” Evolutionary theists are serving the devil, therefore “no considerations of Christian charity, of tolerance, of policy, can exonerate Christian leaders or Churches who fail to condemn and to sever themselves from compromising, cowardly, shilly-shallying priests”---the falling stars who “challenge the Divine Authority of Jesus Christ.” (ibid)

The rebuttals, warnings and counsels of the Fathers against listening to Origenists (and their modern evolutionary counterparts) indicates that the spirit of antichrist operating through modern rationalistic criticism of the Revelation of God is not a heresy unique to our times but was inveighed against by early Church Fathers.

From the scholarly writings of the Eastern Orthodox priest, Fr. Seraphim Rose, to the incisive analysis, rebuttals and warnings of the Catholic Kolbe Center, creation.com, Creation Research Institute, Rev. Clarke, and many other stalwart defenders of the faith once delivered, all are a clear, compelling call to the whole body of the Church to hold fast to the traditional doctrine of creation as it was handed down from the Apostles, for as God spoke and Jesus is the Living Word incarnate, it is incumbent upon the faithful to submit their wills to the Divine Will and Authority of God rather than to the damnable heresy proffered by falling stars eager to embrace naturalistic science and the devil's antithesis--- evolution. But if it seem evil to you to serve the Lord,

“…you have your choice: choose this day that which pleases you, whom you would rather serve….but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15

I find it inexplicable that Thomas Molnar would regard Plato as a gnostic thinker

Spirited: Molnar was not characterizing Plato as a Gnostic thinker, for he was no such thing, but rather demonstrating common points of departure between ancient pantheist nature religions and modern Gnostic movements, with ‘matter is evil’ being of primary importance.

Consider for example the modern Gnostic-Hindu-spiritist-pantheist worldview of Marxist Communism. Jehovah God is the evil demiurge, creator of the matter into which divine sparks have fallen. But because the Divine One Substance is within the consciousness of the Gnostic magician, then he is a man-god who creates his own world and meaning in every living moment out of his own consciousness. The Gnostic magus is a god who controls matter because he controls mind. The physical world then, is an illusion (maya) because reality is inside the divine mind.

This way of thinking is captured by George Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world (evil matter) is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party.

At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,

“…in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” (Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)

When the Thought Police agent O’Brien (Gnostic magus)tortures Winston for “wrong thought” he states,

“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation-—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”

Big Brother is a modern Gnostic-Hindu-spiritist pantheist magician or god-man in a long line of pagan magicians going back to Nimrod and the ancient Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus to the more recent Simon Magus, the Gnostic Valentinus, Eastern Tantric sages, Yogis, and god-men to Renaissance magicians such as Agrippa, Paracelsus and Pico della Mirandola.

Like all nature systems, Big Brother holds to the oneness of existence. This means that bodies (matter) and elements are mutually transmutable. This was announced as the Grand Principle of Hermes Trismegistus and found expression in the teaching that,

” …everything that is high is equal to what is low, and everything low is equal to what is high.” (God and the Knowledge of Reality, Thomas Molnar, p. 82)

Hermes formula means that there is an absolute although hidden unity, a Great Chain of Being, between the lower world of matter and the higher realm of the impersonal world soul(One Substance), the key of which (gnosis)lends to the magician incalculable powers when he learns how to acquire divine intellect.

“My question is whether Ms irish considers our Founders to have been infected with gnosticism through their Freemasonic memberships, and if so, did that fatally compromise their Revolution and Constitution?”

Spirited: The Founders warned that ignorant (intellectually lazy), morally degenerate citizenry will signify the downfall of our Constitutional Republic. That time is now and your incredibly uninformed, simple-minded postulations amply demonstrate their warning.

The inquiring mind in search of truth knows that from the time of Mystery Religion Babylon, all Mystery Religions have consisted of a large outer-circle of true believers within which is a small, inner circle of mystical adepts and initiates. The same configuration applies to Free Masonry’s inner circle of illumined initiates and adepts.

With respect to the Founders, they belonged to the large outer circle, not to the inner circle where the satanic reigned. Benjamin Franklin came closest to the inner circle when he took part in the Hell Fire Club activities when in Europe.

I question if your assault on gnostics is also an assault on our Founders, and therefore also an attack on our Founding principles?

Oh for heaven's sake, BroJoeK, would you please calm down? I wasn't doing a "critique" of gnosticism; I merely gave a sketch of its history and its characteristic features as noted by the great philosopher of culture and history, Eric Voegelin [1901–1985].

But I will tell you I find gnostic thinking contemptible: It seems its main drive is to invert reality, so to establish a Second Reality wherein Man can freely create a utopian society that will "end history."

Unfortunately, this has been tried many times before. It seems Second Realities sooner or later come up crashing against the shoals of First Reality. But usually not without causing catastrophic damage to persons, property, and society as a whole in the meanwhile.

The method of construction of a Second Reality requires it to "kill off God" first. By "killing" the God of Holy Scriptures, it ends up killing man, and destroying societies.

It is "'wicked"; but its wickedness has a limit: You really cannot kill God, or do anything to avoid His Judgment. But you might destroy your soul in trying....

Of course, deep-down, Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, Hegel all realized that it is absurd for man to think he could actually physically "kill" God. But they had a handy work-around for that: They said, in effect, God is only an abstract mental image. Feuerbach insisted He is merely a mental projection of what man most values in his existence — another abstraction — which men falsely proceed to worship. Marx's advice: Just get rid of the "God abstraction" in your mind, and He is effectively dead — at least for you. This is tantamount to the closure of the soul to God and His Spirit. God is not so much killed as evicted. But you have to get rid of God somehow, because you can't build a Second Reality if you are subject to His Law and Justice.

Anyhoot, WRT to the Founding Fathers: Yes, many were Masons. (So was my father.) Eric Voegelin traces Freemasonry back to gnostic roots. But does this necessarily mean the Founders (and my father) were a bunch of gnostics?

Voegelin, in "The New Science of Politics" [2000], differentiates between two "waves" of gnostic influence on society and culture in the West in the post-Renaissance period:

The corrosion of Western civilization through Gnosticism is a slow process extending over a thousand years. The several Western political societies, now, have a different relation to this slow process according to the time at which their national revolutions occurred. When the revolution occurred early, a less radical wave of Gnosticism was its carrier, and the resistance of the forces of tradition was, at the same time more effective. When the revolution occurred at a later date, a more radical wave was its carrier, and the environment of tradition was already corroded more deeply by the general advance of modernity. The English revolution, in the seventeenth century, occurred at a time when gnosticism had not yet undergone its radical secularization [thanks to, e.g., Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel et al.].... The American Revolution, though its debate was already strongly affected by the psychology of the Enlightenment, also had the good fortune of coming to its close within the institutional and Christian climate of the ancien regime. In the French Revolution, then, the radical wave of Gnosticism was so strong that it permanently split the nation into the laicist half that based itself on the revolution and the conservative half that tried, and tries, to salvage the Christian tradition [sound familiar?]. The German Revolution, finally, in an environment without strong institutional traditions, brought for the first time into full play economic materialism, racist biology, corrupt psychology, scientism, and technological ruthlessness — in brief, modernity without restraint. Western society as a whole, thus, is a deeply stratified civilization in which the American and English democracies represent the oldest, most firmly consolidated stratum of civilizational tradition, while the German area represents it most progressively modern stratum. {emphasis added; [bracketed material] just me talking to myself.}

Anyhoot, I daresay the Founders and Framers — children of the Enlightenment in one sense — though members of a "secret society" whose membership was openly comprised by virtually all intellectual and fashionable men of the time, could not have been gnostics. They were men deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and thus protected against infection by "radical" gnostic ideas.

Rather, they saw the United States of America as a nation under God; and declared that all our natural liberties, a/k/a/ inalienable rights, are the gifts of God to every man equally, in justice, not grants of the State.

You won't find any gnostic ideas in the Declaration of Independence; the Preamble; or the Constitution they wrought.

So please, dear BroJoeK, do not categorize me as someone who wants to "vacuum up" the Framers because they are Masons, and therefore, by implication, gnostics.

betty: The method of construction of a Second Reality requires it to “kill off God” first. By “killing” the God of Holy Scriptures, it ends up killing man, and destroying societies.

Spirited: Christian tradition teaches an interfacing, interacting two-dimensional or total view of reality consisting of the seen (physical matter) and the unseen (spiritual matter). Man for example, consists of flesh (physical matter) and soul/spirit (spiritual matter).

In opposition to the Christian view, all nature systems from the time of Mystery Religion Babylon adhere to a one-dimensional view of reality in which either only spiritual matter is reality (Stoics, Christian era Gnostics, modern Gnostics, Hindus, occult New Age, New Physics) or physical matter is reality(Atomists, Enlightenment Physicalists).

This brings us to the God that modern Gnostic theoreticians hate and want dead: Jehovah God, creator of both spiritual and physical matter.

For over two-thousand years, Christendom and Protestant America were grounded in the two-dimensional view of reality without which man is not a person but rather an aspect of the one substance (monism). This brings us to the meaning of ‘second reality.’

Second reality refers to a one-dimensional view of reality positing the existence of an impersonal, spontaneously generated Divine One Substance, an impersonal, unknowing Mind encompassing the cosmos and everything within the cosmos. Since all that exists is this Mind (i.e.,Brahman)and this Mind is the source of evolutionary energy, zoe, serpent power, Kundalini, Bosons, Christ-consciousness or the Force within the consciousness of man, then the man who “goes within” (self-induced trance states), who masters the seething energies of Lucifer as certain Free Mason adepts taught (occult rituals/Magic Way) is granted powerful gnosis (inner knowing), spiritual empowerment and apotheosis.

This way of thinking is captured by George Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world (evil matter) in attainment of a second reality (within the god-like mind of Big Brother) is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party.

At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,

When the Thought Police agent O’Brien (Gnostic magus)tortures Winston for “wrong thought” he states,

Big Brother is a modern Gnostic-Hindu-spiritist pantheist magician or god-man in a long line of pagan magicians going back to Nimrod and the ancient Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus to Simon Magus, the Gnostic Valentinus, Eastern Tantric sages, Yogis, and god-men to Renaissance magicians such as Agrippa, Swedenborg, and Paracelsus.

“Among Paine's most notable admirers was a young Abraham Lincoln,”

Really?! That would be a remarkable feat given that Abe was born on February 12, 1809, and Paine died June 8 that same year. Perhaps you are thinking of the Abraham Lincoln who was Abe’s grandfather, and a participant in the Pennsylvania Convention to Adopt the Federal Constitution, serving as a rep for Berks County. Undoubtedly Paine had the older Lincoln’s unreserved support, as he had the support of nearly every colonialist who was not a rabid Loyalist. Until 1794 that is, when Paine’s Age of Reason was published.

Paine’s harshest critics regard him as little more than a polemicist, or (in modern parlance) a propagandist. It seems to be true that when Paine turned from unseating kings to unseating bishops, his rhetoric changed accordingly. Paine was wonderfully popular with the American People in 1776 when he wrote Common Sense, and excited no animosity with The Rights of Man in 1792. But his Age of Reason in 1794, which was no more than a vicious attack on the Holy Bible, having nothing to do with either enlightenment or government, turned the American people against him. The reverse was irrevocable (Adams was furious with him to near sputtering, his reaction mirroring that of the American People). Paine died in poverty, unforgiven for his betrayal.

What is astonishing is the reaction of the modern enemies of the Judeo-Christian tradition, who seem to think that Paine’s 1794 composition of The Age of Reason could somehow have had an influence on the American revolutionary act of 1776 in a form of an incomprehensible quirky time warp to which they all refer, but none can explain. Why are you buying the America-haters’ schtick?

What did Paine hope to conserve? Surely not his reputation, as he discovered when he returned to America from France to the universal condemnation by the same people who he had so inspired twenty years earlier as to be thought one of the prime movers of American Independence. In 1776 it can hardly be thought that Paine represented any great diversity of thought in the Americans. To the contrary he was a quintessential unifying American voice of the Revolution. It was his finest hour, and one he would never repeat.

Or, perhaps you meant to say that Abe was a great admirer of the Paine of 1776, overlooking the subsequent actions Paine took which utterly destroyed his prior reputation and standing with the American people. But that would be hard to understand, given the precision Lincoln applied in expressing his thoughts.

This conversation has previously taken place on FR (sans Lincoln’s grandfather). Perhaps you suffer from long-term memory loss (December 5, 2009, and thereabouts). I know I do. Old age is my excuse. What’s yours?

“a fact which makes me wonder if those who attack Paine so vigorously are also subtly attacking Lincoln himself?”

Explain your accusation. How do the dynamics work? Explain the connection you make between Lincoln and Paine, who lived in different ages and contended with different issues.

Paine’s talent lay in his indulgence in the use of polemics, and he seemed to tailor his message to his audience. Perhaps the explanation for the disparity between The Age of Reason and Common Sense is as simple as that.

. . . “You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life, without the assistance afforded by religion; you having a clear perception of the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security. And perhaps you are indebted to her originally, that is, to your religious education, for the habits of virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. You might easily display your excellent talents of reasoning upon a less hazardous subject, and thereby obtain a rank with our most distinguished authors. For among us it is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating his mother.”

(Franklin’s letter to Thomas Paine, date unknown - See Jared Sparks, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, (Boston: Tappan, Whittemore, and Mason, 1840), Vol. X, pp. 281-282.)

Today, when we contemplate Common Sense, we admire how wonderfully Paine summed up the American Spirit of ‘76, and we forget how bitterly he subsequently betrayed that same Spirit. But the Americans of the Revolution never forgot, and never forgave. The Abe Lincoln of the 19th Century, being a consummate student of American History, would know this.

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